Thursday, May 18, 2017

“On the morning of the 2d of August, 1848, the good packet
ship “Diadem” sailed out of its London dock, bearing to the New World, in the
midst of much other more or less precious freight, a group of German
musicians.”

That group of musicians included 24 members. They called
themselves the Germania Musical Society, and they took the United States of
America by whatever counts as the 19th-century equivalent of “by storm.” But
that story starts with a back-story. And a premise.

It’s safe to call the United States of America, as a
country, self-assured. That better-than-healthy ego has spurred its shares of
accomplishments and atrocities, but it has carried the country through a lot and
generally left it whole and, let’s face it, fat and wealthy. Americans like to
think of themselves as leaders – or, if not that, sort of “alpha people,”
better than your average [insert name/nickname of nationality of your choice]
(also, keep it clean, dammit).

Inevitably, there are areas where that self-belief trips up
a little. I’d say classical music, as an art, sits at the heart of one of
those areas. I don’t know much about classical music, certainly not enough to
state with any confidence that the U.S. has never produced a classical composer
of any renown. I’m also reasonably confident that only a vanishingly small
number of Americans could name an American composer in a street-ambush
interview, never mind one of any real consequence. Even as several American
cities have resident symphonies, classical music doesn’t move the zeitgeist so
much these days, and, if it ever did, I don’t know about it.

At the same time, Richard Crawford’s, America’s Musical
Life: A History (as well as its “lightly” annotated version, now owned by the author, An Introduction to
America’s Music) makes clear that classical music mattered. A proud lineage of,
frankly, cultural high-brows has championed classical music since the U.S. has
been a country. Crawford wrote a brilliant line about one of America’s more
idealistic evangels, Theodore Thomas:

“Where most performers were obliged to respect audience
taste enough to gratify it, Thomas worked to elevate public taste to a point
where it would be worth gratifying.”

That’s as eloquent a way as I can think of to describe the
specific tension between lowbrow and high in just about any art form. Because
this series focuses on popular music, I don’t want to write much about classical
music. I also believe that classical music counts as a clear and particular
manifestation of the argument that Europe has “culture” whereas America does not.
Not a little of what I read in Crawford, annotated or otherwise, confirms that.
At the same time, classical compositions lent some artistic spine to what live
performances occurred in mid-to-late 19th century America – and those
performances, being live and attended by some amount of the public therefore
count as “popular.” Because what is popular, after all, if not something people
pay to listen to and look at?

And now I’m back to the Germania Music Society.

I pulled the quote up top from a Scribners Monthly article
I found online, and I’d encourage anyone interested enough to read it. I’m also
going to borrow another passage, because it gets at a couple key concepts –
among them, how and where people found live music (i.e., the only kind
available) at the time, but, more importantly, the going state of musical
attainment at the time the Germania arrived:

“It would be difficult to attempt a description of musical
affairs in America at that period, which would be intelligible to one who knows
only the standards of the present. Very few virtuosi, either singers or
instrumentalists, had yet visited the “States.” Even the opera was almost a
novelty, although at this very period Madame Ladborde, with a meager troupe,
was performing in New York. Jenny Lind, who occasioned the earliest general
furore in regard to music, did not arrive till nearly three years later. There
was not even a decent opera house in America. Dingy theaters and barren public
halls were the sole provision for accommodating public gatherings.”

“The condition of orchestral music was even still lower.”

Look past all the passive verb tenses, and you've got a
fantastic frame for both the state and the sense of cultural inferiority
Americans felt in relation to Europe’s musical heritage. It doesn’t go so far
to argue that the (aka) Old Germania Orchestra sailed across the sea to fill a
void. And, as just about any indie band in the world can relate to, these guys
struggled to find an audience, especially a paying one – they had to pay 24
musicians, they had the gas shut off at shows, etc. Even before arriving in the
States (they had a detour in London), these guys busted ass, starved, scrambled
and shilled, but, again, like any good indie band, they also found ardent fans.
Or, as Scribners framed the pattern, “Artistic success, immense; pecuniary
success, infinitesimal.” They even broke up at one point,
only to have a fat plum of a gig in Washington, DC drop in their laps. That was
the beginning of the beginning in some ways, too.

They eventually found their crowd, or vice versa, with more
or less permanent homes between Baltimore, Boston, and a standing summer gig in
Newport, Rhode Island (from Scribners: “…it would not be too much to say that
the popularity of Newport was quite as much due to their presence as to any
other influence”). Outside those spots, the Germania’s musicians toured like
maniacs and held together remarkably well throughout (after five years, 14 of
that original 24 stuck with the band). In the end, just about all of them
settled in the States, married, bred, found straight jobs, spread the gospel about classical music and forms, etc. They also
invited competition…and one of those guys was sort of a trip.

Like the Germania – and I really did fail to stress this
enough above – Jullien knew what he was doing, classically trained and all that. That
was an enormous piece of their appeal, not least to the musically-educated
persons of the American public. As implied in the paragraph quoted above, that
Scribners article spoke from a time when Americans had, to some extent, caught
up. By way of setting a sort of bar, the Germania and Jullien inspired the
establishment of symphonies and “musical societies”; people and organizations
started organizing regular live performances that exposed the public to not
just classical music, but to just music. As noted in earlier chapters, technological
improvements gave a big assist in that, and all this…“musical infrastructure”
grew up alongside the parlor songs people played in households and (again, ew) minstrelsy.

I bring in the last two because, per a couple things noted
above, the American musical market impacted Jullien and the Germania, even as
it was impacted by them. Jullien, in particular, wasn’t shy about adapting popular
ballads and parlor songs to suck in his audience a little deeper. If you’re not
familiar with the quadrille – which, as I see it, looks more like an annoying social ritual
than dancing – Jullien was a master of it and, per Crawford, he adapted
American then-classics like "Yankee Doodle," "Hail Columbia," "Hail to the Chief,"
and, the minstrel classic, “The Old Folks at Home” to the quadrille “format.”
The Germania followed suit with a song called “Up Broadway,” a musical series
of vignettes about one of Manhattan’s more famous streets, which I’m pissed off
to report I can’t find.

I stuffed a lot into the above, not too much, hopefully, but
the assertion I’m striving for is basically this: at least one strain of
American popular music – or at least music that was reasonably popular with
Americans – drew from American sources and, now that it was available, classical
music in the European tradition. The bands that played these in various venues –
e.g., gradually upgraded versions of the “dingy theaters and barren public
halls” noted above, as well as the so-called “promenade concerts” – played a
mash-up from those sources. So, in a sense, that was hip.

In the complete version of his work (American Musical Life),
Crawford noted the program for a public performance around the immediate middle
of the 19th century. That’s below with links to some version of the song where
I could find one – and sometimes a version that, at least from what I gather, sounds
close to what people of the time might have heard (or, in one case, a specific
instrument they might have heard) at the time. And it would have been played by
a band heavy with the “valve-less” horns described in an earlier post.

And that’s where I’ll leave this. enjoy the songs if you
want to. Now, the programs:

That’s all for this chapter. Wait, no, I want to plug a group called the Yankee Brass Band, because, from what Crawford describes, I'm guessing they're pretty close to what one would have heard around the time I'm talking about (see above, Part II, No. 4). At any rate, the next couple chapters will track the
development of classical music in America, mostly through the lens of some
American originals. After that, I’ve got a chapter on marches (and the America’s
“proto-Lalapalooza”) sketched out. A series of chapters after that will look at
the most popular songs from 1840-1930, as judged by a single Youtube video…

…and after that…holy shit, I might have to finally dive into
the unholy mess that is genres. Boots trembling, and this many months ahead.